Hi,
I'm thinking about building my own NAS for some time, and I'm now looking for some hardware suggestions. I've already read some interesting posts on this forum, but I would like to ask some more questions.
My needs are:
- 2TB HDD space
- >10MB/s transfert rate (the more, the better)
- Reliable
- Cheap
- Power efficient
- Silent
Basically, I'll use this NAS to store data I don't want to loose, that's why "Reliable" is in my needs: If I put files in it, I would like to be fairly sure that I won't loose them even if I don't have any other backups.
I'll store my personal files (music, source code of my projects, backup of servers,...) and the ones from my girlfriend (she is a graphist, she has a lot of images, projects, videos,...). The NAS will be mainly accessed via Samba.
I do no t plan to use this NAS as a media player, transcoder, downloader,...
I see to possibilities:
- Using an ARM SBC, like the Odroid XU4, and connect 2x 2TB external hard drives
- Build a full low-cost computer (based on a mini-ITX motherboard with fanless CPU, and internal SATA drives).
In both cases, I would use one hard drive as the "data" hard-drive, and the second one as a backup. A cron job would run rsync every night to backup the "data" hard drive on the second one, the "backup" hard drive.
I think that the XU4 will be cheaper than a full low-cost PC, and will be more power efficient, but it is also less expandable. And I don't know about the reliability of the board and its power supply.
The PC would cost more money and use more electricity, but it is more expandable.
I've already tried to build this kind of NAS with a RaspberryPi and my openWRT router, but the network speed is too low (~6Mo/s for the rpi and ~10 for my router).
What do you think about this? Do you have any thoughts about the 2 solutions? Or another possibility?
Thanks for your help!